Five things I’ve learned about Social Media, StumbleUpon style
It started way back in March. On a whim that became a gauntlet of a dare to myself, I live blogged SXSW Interactive.
The more I posted here at the NMB, the more clicks our nascent blog was getting. Then, after posting this about Zappos handing out trash bag ponchos, I saw stumbleupon.com/refer.php in my TypePad statistics pane. Then there were 10. Two hours later there were another 440.
Holy smokes, what is this site?
After trying my initial hand at Twitter — which was too little too late to enjoy at SXSW — I decided to give StumbleUpon a good go to see what I had in common with what were now thousands of referrals to my blog.
In the five or so weeks since then, I can say that SU and I have moved past the honeymoon: still happily stumbling away.
Here are a few things I’ve picked up that I thought were worth sharing:
1) StumbleUpon exposes me to people with similar personal and professional experiences, and to sites I would have never seen before.
It’s actually true. Facebook is fun for goofing. Myspace feels like I’m in a middle-school art class. LinkedIn? I know it’s good for something, I’ve made and seen a lot of fun work connections. I really want to like Del.icio.us, but just can’t get in a rhythm with the usability. Digg is like an overcrowded public pool: there is a neat slide, but who are all these people?
StumbleUpon really does deliver to me – an adult – a nice visual interface and loads of quick-hit sites I like. The dynamic here is that you click a button on a toolbar, and the service offers you a Website recommended (thumbs-up toolbar button) by another stumbler with similar interests. It also shows you who that stumbler is.
Like the site you just stumbled? Check out that stumbler’s SU "blog," a collection of all the sites they’ve found and/or thumbed-up in the past. You can mail each other, thumb-up or -down each other, and friend each other. If you make friends with another stumbler, as I understand it, your stumbles will include more sites recommended by them.
There are many other nuances, like sending pages with notes directly to friends, but really it creates a very interesting group of friends who are endlessly supplying me with really cool sites I would have never found any other way.
2) Be nice. The people here are friendly.
I get shouted at so much on Digg, I’m beginning to get the feeling the relationship is more co-dependently abusive than beneficial. Not so on StumbleUpon (so far).
SU filters so well, that even when I’m friended by spammers or people only looking for hits, they fade rather quickly into the rearview. What’s left are about 200 folks that I’m genuinely interested in seeing what they’re seeing on the Web.
What’s more, they’re all fairly nice and genuine. If I get pinged that someone else has looked at my stumbles, I write them a thank-you note. Many other stumblers do the same. It’s a small symptom of a larger good: here’s something I like enough to pass along. For whatever reason. It’s pleasantly addictive: like tea time.
3) It’s doing a ton of fascinating persona work for me
As super-genius Steve Krug says in Don’t Make Me Think, users aren’t like anything. Each experience is completely idiosyncratic.
So as someone always interested in what Web pages make up a personality, StumbleUpon is an endless candy store. The ranges of people go from teens to seniors, and everyone in between.
Because the visual grid of pages that a stumbler thumbs-up is shown chronologically, it is an vast array of rich snapshots into the people who make up SU. A 24 year old woman has an avatar picture of she and her boyfriend, and the majority of her stumbles are about bridal and wedding preparation. A 60 year-old man who likes travel, comics and dogs. With every new stumbler I see a fascinating extension of a personality that is as unique as it is representative.
4) It’s not promotion if you’re genuine
I read a lot about the loathed practice of "Self-stumbling." It’s basically posting something on the Web, officially discovering it, and then lather, rinse, repeat to get more hits to your blog. I self-stumble all the time, but the goal isn’t to get hits, that’s just a by-product: an indicator of how well I’m writing.
As someone who cares about what they blog, I want to share this with the people in my network on SU. I use this blog as an extension of my SU experience, to complement all my other stumbles. I really want to know what the other people in the network think about this blog and its contents (read: please comment and thumb-up).
5) Un-friending is painful
The worst part about StumbleUpon is that in general the stumblers I’ve found out there have all piqued my interest in one way or another. The teen girl who stumbles endlessly about TV shows. The guy who does nothing but recommend sports stories. They fall off the radar if their picture isn’t sitting on my homepage.
SU, as a spam deterrent, rightfully limits folks to a friends list of 200. Seems like a lot, but right now I’m constantly hovering around the limit. Because SU has this unique visual, and personal way of displaying people in the network, unfriending people goes right to the pit of my stomach.
This feature forces me to go walk the green mile of creating a quasi-strategy around taking friends off my list. It kills me, and I hate every solitary second of it. So to any stumbler I’ve recently or will soon unfriend, please take it with my deepest regrets.
Maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this: StubleUpon is evocative and personal. At times, stunningly so, and even when I don’t expect it to be. This in-and-of itself is the reason I keep coming back. It’s also why I recommend it to people I know, and feel like this article just barely scratches the surface of what people find so compelling about the network.
Got a #6? Some angle I missed? Let me know below. And of course, you can find my StumbleUpon page here.
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